VMware vSphere Reviews

The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us. Performance, stability, and functionality just keep getting better.

It enables us to move faster when we're going through the legacy systems. Before vSphere, someone had to wait between one and three months to get service which we can now implement in ten minutes.

There are a couple areas for improvement that I can see. First, I'd like to see better performance for vCenter. And, I'd also like to see NSF 4.1 fully supported. There are some NSF features lacking from version 3 to 4.1.

We've been using it for more than ten years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The stability has been great. I have only experienced one point down and that was caused by our system.

There was also an issue with expiring licenses in 2008, but that was fixed pretty quickly and a new implementation was put in place to prevent that from happening again.

The product has been so stable that we keep using it. We also didn't want to change it too much because it would require management team training.

It has scaled for us and the workload that we have that runs on it.

We started using it because there weren't any competitors at the time. There was only VMware.

Complexity depends on how you're implementing it because vSphere has a lot of products. If you're looking looking to install vCenter, it quite easy.

If you're using a lot of the other products, you have to be careful. Today, we use almost every product from VMware and we still have to be careful with the updates.

Start small in a development environment. For $200 per year, you can get access to files VMUGs. 

You can get a 60-day free trial with a download from the VMware website, but I recommend using VMUGs and attending local VMUG meetings. They have a lot of really capable technicians who really love to share.

Of course we continue to look at the competitors to see what features are coming. In my opinion, it doesn't matter because VMware is still ahead of the competition.

Pretty much everything about VMware is a strong point. From my point of view, it's one of the most stable and scalable technologies on the market, and when it comes to virtualization it's probably the very best there is. 

As a backup and storage admin, I haven't had the chance to explore in-depth all of its features, but what I did get to work with thoroughly seemed very reliable, just to name a few: vMotion and Storage vMotion, Storage APIs (such as VAAI), Storage Thin Provisioning, good integration with LUN mapping to VMFS, etc.

Obviously, it brought with it many of the unique things that any virtualization technology provides, such as High Availability and trimming down costs and data center space requirements. It helped us develop some of our most important and complex infrastructure projects, such as: VDI, Internal Cloud (IaaS for internal Dev Teams), Data Center Clustering with good High Availability potential, etc.

Hard to say what I'd like to see in the next versions. Over the years, the VMware development team constantly delivered major improvements to this product. I've only had the chance to work version 4.5 up to 5.5. Since I haven't had the chance to test the current version which is 6, I think it wouldn't be fair to make suggestions due to the fact that some of my ideas may have already been implemented starting with version 6. 

However, when I think of what tried me most with vSphere, it's probably the fact that my colleagues and I on the Virtual Infrastructure Admin team always had to do debugging and troubleshooting on VM configuration files in a manual manner if we wanted to bring to life broken VMs. 

Sure, some official KBs are pretty useful but not all issues can be covered by them. It would really ease up and speed up the troubleshooting process for advanced and experienced administrators if vSphere had some sort of VM file debug tool that can also run automatic integrity checks and repairs based on the entire set of configuration files, live run-logs, a potential database that logs the history of changes made to the VMs, and stuff like that. 

This would be especially useful when you have environments that tend to do a lot of Snapshot manipulations such as those that use specialized virtual backup and/or replication software.

I've been using it for about a year and a half. Currently, the organization where I work has most of its virtualized infrastructure running v5.5 (we're towards the end of a broad upgrade project) throughout the last year and a half. Since I've been occupying my current position, I've also had the chance to use also versions 4.5, 5 and 5.1.

Deployment isn't the simplest nor the most complex. If you can install a standard HP & Dell server, there's no reason you couldn't take care of a VMWare ESXi Hypervisor. After that, configuration and administration via the vSphere console is pretty easy.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with scalability.

Personally, I haven't had the chance to work with the VMware customer service since most of the issues encountered were usually fixed by applying the solutions presented in official KBs.

Before VMware, our company used to employ Citrix for the VDI infrastructure. Besides being more easy to use for the common VDI user, VMware also allowed us to step up the game by also taking the majority of your server infrastructure to the virtual environment.

Both deployment and administration of the VMware infrastructure in our organization is performed by internal specialized teams.

Truthfully, I'm not using many of the available features. My needs have been small in that we just needed to virtualize our environment and manage it effectively. VMware vSphere has served that purpose greatly. I’m sure what I get out of vSphere, though, could potentially be gained just as easily via other virtualization platforms available today, but at the time I felt those were too immature to risk. VMware just worked with little to no issue, so I trust them going forward.

The largest benefit for my companies that have used this is the consolidation of our physical server footprint. Never would I thought I could run as many VMs on a single host as we do today.

Overall I’m very happy with what the product brings so I can’t suggest any major improvements. However, I’m very disappointed in VMware’s decision to push management to a web-based vCenter client and away from the standalone thick client. The web client is just terrible in so many ways, mainly on a performance basis. It is very slow. I also find the thick client much easier to navigate and work with my VMs. A large user population shares my sentiment as there are a number of posts in VMware’s forums regarding the issues with the web client. I hope VMware realizes this and either greatly enhances the web client or moves back to the thick client for management.

I have been using it since vSphere 4, so approximately five to six years.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

It was pretty straightforward, from what I recall, but I did not do most of the initial setup. I assisted a colleague who took the reigns.

I've rarely had to enlist support, but when I have it’s been what I would expect.

It was pretty straightforward, from what I recall but I did not do most of the initial set-up. I assisted a colleague who took the reigns.

My first environment was set up by a single colleague with my assistance. The only advice I can really give is to really know your requirements for the systems and software you intend to virtualize and build a proper sized VM environment to host them. Oversubscribing resources is, in my opinion, the biggest concern and something that happens easily. Also factor in proper storage built to handle the I/O load of a virtual environment. Lastly, build your VM environment to factor in an N+1 design to ensure if a host fails, the remaining host(s) can handle the load of all VMs that were running on the failed host and always allow for a 15% overhead of free resources under full load.

I really did not handle the financial aspects of my VM environments, but I do know VMware is pricey. These days, from a price point, I would take a hard look at MS Hyper-V as they are catching up with VMware fairly quickly.

When I first looked into virtualization it was back when VMware released vSphere 4. At that time I was interested in Citrix Xen and MS Hyper-V. I felt at the time VMware was the industry leader and was more mature so I trusted them above all others. I’ve been happy with the choice since, though for cost purposes I am really interested in Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution.

Cost considerations aside, be sure to properly scale your VM environment above all else. This is true regardless of product.

Cross vCenter vMotion is a valuable feature.

It allows you to perform vMotion from one vCenter to another vCenter without the need for shared storage, like a cut and paste.

This was not possible until version 6 and is built upon Enhanced vMotion.

It requires L2 network connectivity.

Cross vCenter vMotion can be particularly useful if you have migration projects, or you simply want to shift workloads to different location.

It can be particularly useful if you have plans to move from a VCSA to a Windows Platform vCenter and vice-versa.

If you have shared resources with public/private cloud, you can move them by establishing several vCenters.

One improvement could be to have the vMotion independent of the SSO Domain.

With Cross vCenter vMotion, it is a requirement to have both the source and the destination vCenter on the same SSO domain. It also requires version 6 and above. You cannot have this between a version 6 and 5.5.

I still experience lag with the web interface

We've found that the most valuable features for us are:

• vMotion
• Replication
• Portability

It's improved our functioning in three areas:

• Deployment
• Backup
• Disaster Recovery

One way VMware could improve on this solutions is to re-incorporate the FAT client along with the web client.

I've used it for nine years.

Deployment is done with future needs in mind. But with day-to-day deployment, we haven't had any issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We've been able to scale out at deployment time to match our predicted future needs.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

No previous solution was in place.

The set-up is very straightforward.

We used in-house staff to deploy. Depending on the implementation, you would decide then on a vendor, if necessary.

I don’t have a specific number on the ROI, but it has been very good.

I would recommend discussing an ELA with the vendor.

Think of the entire environment when making this decision - deployment, storage, backups, etc.

• vMotion
• HA
• Snapshots

In the past without virtualization, it normally took several hours to get a new server built, including cabling, racking and OS imaging. Now we can use templates with many OS flavours and we can get a new server running in few minutes.

Currently we are struggling to keep the storage capacity under control and as we do not use thin provisioning our capacity is always a challenge, but the actual used space by the guests is pretty low. We need to find a way to go to thin provisioning and keep that under control and implement automation on the capacity management and have threshold alerting.

I've been using VMware for seven years.

We have no problems deploying vSphere.

So far, I only had problems with stability when we implemented a third-party backup tool that uses VMware snapshots to take backups. It brought some instability to some guests at the beginning and it took us some weeks to get to the root cause and things back to an acceptable level of stability.

This is a very good solution and I work for a company with a global ELA with VMware. But as our contract and all our commercial team is in the US, we have a limited number of vouchers for training and events in Brazil.

The technical support is good and they always provide good suggestions and technical recommendations and the response time for critical problems has always fair been fair.

I have never tried a different server or datacenter virtualization solution before.

I was not a part of the initial set-up or project team. I work on the operations team and I have only been a part of migration team when moving from old versions to newer ones, but I have never had problems.

You should have good capacity management and you might have at least two clusters or more to separate your guests by tiers or have a good notion of resource pools to keep the resource utilization in good shape.

You should understand what is your demand and plan your capacity and resource allocation carefully to avoid double work in the near future.

• vMotion
• Encapsulation
• Higher usage ratio of hardware
• Storage virtualization

As a consultant and service company, we can manage our own infrastructure with minimal effort, deploy new applications very quickly, and do tests very easily.

In general, the management features need to be improved. vCenter has just gotten really big and overly complicated.

I've used it for over 10 years.

We've encountered no issues with deployment.

We haven't had issues with instability.

We hardly ever have issues with scalability.

We've found customer service to be average.

Technical support used to be better. The response times are OK, but the solution has too many needs too often.

We've been using VMware since the beginning.

I don't have any issues with initial setup.

I do implementations myself.

Carefully think about what features you need now and in the future, because licensing costs depend on that.

Do a PoC and compare it to other solutions.

There are several features we've found valuable, including:

• DRS
• SDRS
• vDS
• Resource pool sharing

By engaging virtualization and vSphere's advanced features, we've started to effectively manage workload and resources, resulting in better performance with fine grained tuning.

One of the features I would like to see is less constraints on the fault tolerance feature. Version 6 may have this, but we don't have it yet.

I've used it for four years.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled sufficiently for us.

We haven’t have many interactions with customer support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We haven’t have many interactions with technical support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We already had knowledge of the product on the team, so it was easy for us.

We're working with a Hardware-as-a-Service model where we're responsible for the software and VMware is responsible for the hardware. We implemented vSphere together with the vendor.

We considered using Xen/KVM, but we didn’t want to spend much time on the configuration and wanted to start working on the product out of the box.

I would recommend analysis of different options and pricing, including public/private-cloud models. Depending on your application and needs, you may not need such an advanced product as vSphere Enterprise.